... And while we're on the subject of the sky

Saturday night I was engaging in my favorite form of amusement, which is going for a run on the beach with my dog Betty and then having a beer, when I happened to notice something unusual in the southern sky.

So did a lot of other people.

It appeared to be a UFO. I had my binoculars at hand and took a good look. It seemed to be a giant cloud. And it was. It was created by a NASA shot out of Wallops Island, Virginia.

CNN affiliate stations from New Jersey to Massachusetts heard from dozens of callers who reported that the lights appeared as a cone shape shining down from the sky.

However, the lights were the result of an experimental rocket launch by NASA from the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, a spokesman told CNN.

Keith Koehler said the Black Brant XII Suborbital Sounding Rocket was launched to study the Earth's highest clouds. The light came from an artificial noctilucent cloud formed by the exhaust particles of the rocket's fourth stage about 173 miles high.

The experiment is the first attempt to create artificial noctilucent clouds. A previous spacecraft, called Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM), launched in 2007 to observe the natural clouds from space.

CARE is slated to launch Tuesday between 7:30 and 7:57 p.m. EDT (2330 and 2357 GMT) from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Noctilucent means "night shining" in Latin. Although difficult to spot with the naked eye, the clouds are best visible when Earth's surface is in darkness and sunlight from below the horizon illuminates the high-altitude clouds.

These clouds, also known as polar mesospheric clouds, are made of ice crystals. The natural ones tend to hover around 50 to 55 miles (80 to 90 km) above the Earth. CARE will release its dust particles a bit higher than that, then let them settle back down to a lower altitude.

"What the CARE experiment hopes to do is to create an artificial dust layer," Scales told SPACE.com. "Hopefully it's a creation in a controlled sense, which will allow scientists to study different aspects of it, the turbulence generated on the inside, the distribution of dust particles and such."

By the way, the reason I had my bonoculars ready is that of late I've started studying the evening sky for satellites. They are very easy to see, it turns out, if you're in a spot without much ambient light, such as the beach. This Space.com site explains:

If you go out and carefully study the sky near dusk or dawn, and you have relatively dark skies, the odds are that you should not have to wait more than 15 minutes before you see one of the more than 35,000 satellites now in orbit around Earth.

The article notes that International Space Station is particularly easy to see. And in fact, once you get used to looking for these satellites you can see one perhaps every five minutes.

One of these days I will train Betty to bark each time one comes by.

But that Saturday evening event was particularly interesting. I knew it was something unusual but wasn't quite sure what until I talked with Marty at the Beach House surf shop.

Marty is a former Air Force officer and a real space cadet - and I mean that in a nice way.